Stardust
by Santanico
Summary: A trip inside the frozen, unconscious, dreaming mind of Nora Fries.


Author's Note: this weird little piece is told from the point of view of Nora Fries, still unconscious and cryogenically entombed - thus, it's a lot more hallucinatory than my previous fics. You have been warned.  
  
Blah blah blah, I own nothin' but the fic.  
  
_Stardust_  
  
By: Santanico  
  
Yesterday evening or maybe it was the night before or the night after, I went walking on my own, as I always go walking on my own these days because you're never here - I went walking on my own through a field of stardust. The fabric of the sky was crumbling and it passed me slowly and silently, glittering and winking like shards of broken mirror, tumbling into jagged black chasms that stretched as far as I could see, yawning like gaping mouths, great expanses of torn black emptiness where no light could penetrate, not even the light of the stardust that crunched beneath my bare and bleeding feet.  
  
The night before that, great vines encircled me as I wandered through a glittering jungle, great living vines that made brittle, melodic music as they snaked around me, clinking together. When the vines held me fast, they trembled against my skin, and their delicate thorns cut into me; I watched, breathing hard, as the drops of blood slid halfway down my naked thighs, then froze in mid-air before they had a chance to fall. The longer I watched them, the more those crimson icicles seemed to twist and malform in kaleidoscopic formation, and, finally, Victor, are you listening? They were roses, Victor. The droplets of blood I'd shed had turned themselves into the most beautiful roses. I reached out, enchanted, wanting to touch them, but the moment I did, they shattered. They were nothing but ice, after all. Nothing but ice.  
  
I've wandered through this land for so long, now, so long. My feet are aching and my teeth are chattering, my skin is blue with cold, and every so often I seem to see things the meaning of which escapes me. Every so often, in a reflective surface - half a mirror suspended in a dark room, a floe of ice drifting past in a river of broken crystals - I catch glimpses of images I'm sure aren't real and mean nothing, but they frighten and upset me nevertheless.  
  
I see myself in a great vertical tomb of melted ice water, eyes closed, peaceful, my hair a curtain of blonde seaweed encircling my face, my neck, my shoulders, as I slowly spin in endless, weightless orbit, suspended away from the world, shut in, or shut out.  
  
I see you, Victor, but I don't recognise you, for you are entombed also, in metal and glass, and your eyes glow like the red suns that rise here every morning. I see you looking at me, I feel you wanting me. I know the pain you feel and I feel the pain you know, but I stay silent, I stay motionless, I watch and I listen as though I am underwater, drowned but not dead.  
  
I see you, Victor, and I see a shadow, a shadow with slitted white eyes and a dark, dead voice. I see you fight this shadow, try to capture it in ice, but it flits away, it melts back into the overwhelming darkness with a muttered threat, and it takes you with it, it takes you from me into a black pit closed off by bars and guards and white padded walls, and I'm alone again, wandering, endlessly wandering, left on my own to wonder what it all means.  
  
I'm sick of wandering on my own. I want to stop a while. I want you here with me. I want to slit that metal skin and let it fall, I want you naked as I am, I want us to make love in the stardust fields under the twin red suns as the sky shatters and falls around us in glittering shards.  
  
But that isn't going to happen, is it? I'm here alone. I'll always be here, alone. I can never stop walking, because I'm afraid of what will happen if I rest a while. Something happened to separate us and I don't know what, and sometimes I can feel my mind drifting somewhere away from me and I have to press myself against something cold, something burning cold, just to feel enough to bring myself back from wherever I find myself going. There are rings of blue fire here, rings of blue fire that spiral and coil away into the atmosphere, and I feel safest when I stand right in the middle of those burning spirals, the arctic cold spidering through my veins, chill winds rushing through my ears, whispering to me _It will be all right, it will all be all right_.  
  
And it is, for a while. When my lips are sparkling blue, and the frost glimmers in my hair at the corners of my vision, I feel closer to you, closer to myself. I know, as long as I'm cold, I won't drift away to someplace warmer, someplace without you. The only suns I need to see are here, and their scarlet warmth is far from me.  
  
Even in warmest Heaven, I would still be dead. Here I am alive. I will hold on to this world of ice, of broken roses, of crumbling skies - this world of stardust. Because it is mine, Victor. Because it is ours. Even if you'll never share it with me. Even if this is a country you'll never see for yourself. It doesn't matter. It's still ours.  
  
Come home, Victor. Come to me. I'm waiting, out here, in the cold. 


End file.
